Your brand is central to your organization. You’ve worked hard to establish it and are justifiably proud of it. Your newsletter must, just like every other piece of content you produce, work within that brand and help reinforce it.
It is vital to carry that branding over into anything that you produce, whether that’s external marketing or communicating with and motivating your team. Consistency builds confidence.
First steps in designing your newsletter to fit your brand.
Colour
In terms of design, you will want to use your primary, secondary and tertiary brand colours. Having said that, you may choose a colour that compliments what is already in place. The key is consistency from issue to issue, whether it’s subheads, background screens, or accents such as pull quotes. This is a great time to start a style guide for your newsletter. (We will revisit this in more depth in later posts)
Fonts
You should have a family of fonts that you use in your marketing and other communications. These should serve as your baseline. If you want to use an additional font to set the tone for a regular column or graphic, it must work with what you’ve already established. (Again, we will revisit this topic in later posts)
Photos and graphics
You should use original photography wherever possible, especially pictures of your people and teams. Thankfully, we live in a world where we all have high-quality cameras in our pockets! (It is helpful to create a simple photography style guide!)
When a graphic or illustration is particularly important, you may choose to hire a professional illustrator or photographer. Much of this depends on your budget, but regardless there needs to be a uniform quality and look and feel to these graphics.
(More on this later in a later post)
Newsletters are a very effective way to build and reinforce your brand by the very nature of their regular, repeated delivery to your audience's inbox.
As stated earlier, consistency is key. Design, message, and tone must all ring true to your audience’s experience of, and expectations of, your brand.
Again, these are just a few of the very first things to consider when designing your newsletter.
